Friday 13 February 2009

There is a large pile of books on the floor to my right awaiting my attention. Yesterday afternoon I was in Edinburgh to meet Simon and Dave about a Distil-related project for later in the year, and afterwards I made it up to Edinburgh University Library where to my slight surprise they had almost every book related to early Scots fiddling that I was looking for. This was a chance to roadtest my enormous new briefcase (well, it's new to me) which coped fine, but my shoulders didn't. Next time I want to carry a month's reading at once, I'll take a rucsac.

Why all the books? Well, in the early 19th century, Nathaniel Gow led the most successful dance band in Scotland, playing regularly at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh. Unusually compared to its London counterparts, the band was prestigious and well-paid: possibly better than their theatre and orchestral colleagues, and certainly well enough for Gow to have the capital to set up shop selling instruments as well as sheet music. But as far as I can make out, we don't even know how many people played in it: we know about the military bands, the Edinburgh Musical Society orchestra, the band at the Theatre Royal - but with Gow, the most celebrated fiddler of his age, son of the legendary Niel, we don't know for sure even what instruments were playing. And this seems to me fairly crucial to an understanding of how the music worked. Maybe there's some information that I've missed, hiding in one of my pile of books. But I suspect that to shed any light on this particular part of Scottish musical history is going to take rather more digging than that.

Meanwhile, various phonecalls and emails have been flying around about a ConCal project next month which is close to confirmation, and yesterday a very interesting proposal indeed came in from Germany.